Early Collegiate Life

First published in 1913, John Venn’s collection of writings describes college life in the early days of the University of Cambridge. Venn, a leading British logician and moral scientist, was president of Gonville and Caius College, and had been a student at Cambridge in the 1850s. This volume of ‘reminiscences of a reading man’ contains articles he contributed to the college magazine, The Caian and speeches and addresses given at College Chapel and Hall. These are interspersed with letters written by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cambridge scholars, and embedded in a commentary that provides additional insights into student life and university politics. He also includes, as an appendix, ‘College Life and Ways Sixty Years Ago’, recounting his own student experiences. Ranging from the Elizabethan to the Victorian era, Early Collegiate Life offers an honest and delightful glimpse into the daily lives of Cambridge scholars of the past.